Neon Neon - Hammer And Sickle

Erotic banquets and Communist dictators in a Feltrinelli-inspired video from the pop duo

Check out the new video from the 80s-inspired electronic pop duo Neon Neon as premiered here, made up of former Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys and producer Boom Bip. The band’s second album, 'Praxis Makes Perfect', will be released later this year, and is built around a rather unexpected protagonist: a little-known 1960s Italian publisher and political campaigner by the name of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. A Communist activist, Feltrinelli traveled the world making friends with Third World radicals like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, before he was found dead under suspicious circumstances at the foot of a high-voltage power line outside Milan in 1972.

The first single off the album is called ‘Hammer and Sickle’, and Neon Neon have once again enlisted the help of Rob Schroeder to direct the visuals (Schroeder is the brains behind the video for the band’s 2008 release ‘I Told Her On Alderaan’). Schroeder’s surreal five-minute spectacle is as intoxicating as the track: peppered with Communist symbols, erotic banquets and cameos by historical dictators, it is a wonderfully disorienting watch.